Stormy weather

Ratnagar is credited with initiating the pictorialist movement in British India. In 1932, along with six other renowned artist photographers, he founded 'Camera Pictorialists of Bombay' for the advancement of pictorialist photography and the recognition of photography as a fine art in India.He was committed to promoting artistic photography in India, organising exhibitions there such as the All-India Salon of Photographic Art in 1933 and the first show of international photography in 1935. Ratnagar’s work was also recognised internationally, and he received a fellowship of both the Royal Photographic Society in Great Britain and the Photographic Society of America.

In a period that saw the increased popular usage of the camera, Ratnagar argued against the prejudices that this created in accepting the potential of the medium as an art form. He claimed that ‘the difference between the millions of people who use cameras and the few who practice pictorial photography is a difference in aim’.1 The true artist, he believed, was well aware of the image that they wished to secure before they took it, but waited for the correct moment – after close observation of the subject and the conditions of light and weather upon it – to create it. ‘Stormy weather’ suggests this carefully staged approach to photography. The mood of the entire composition is translated by the light and feel of a turbulently clouded sky, which exposes the columned post and the shrouded figures which lean against it as surrealist props within the landscape.

Ratganar would almost certainly have been in contact with photographers working in Australia. His work was acquired by the Sydney Camera Circle, a group of photographers in the early 20th century who adopted many of the characteristics associated with Pictorialism. The Sydney Camera Circle gift to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with its inclusion of work by famous international pictorial photographers illustrates how this aesthetic, with its soft hues and artistic outlook, was a world-wide phenomenon and how Australian photographers were well aware of the styles and attitudes of their international colleagues.

1. Ratnagar F R 1942, ‘Photography as a fine art’, ‘Indian Photography and Cinematography’, Jul p 75